Nokia makes contributions to SONiC ecosystem led by Microsoft

The telecom market is slowly moving from a hardware based, to a software based market, with new software companies entering the field, while the legacy network infrastructure giants are also trying to keep the pace there. With its recent partnership with Microsoft, Nokia Corporation is accelerating its software business, that is currently in a much better position than Networks.

Nokia has announced a collaboration with Microsoft (again) as part of their SONiC initiative. Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) is an open-source network operating system based on Linux that has been production-hardened in the data centers in some of the largest cloud-service providers.

Originally developed by Microsoft for Azure, SONiC is now being managed by Open Compute Project and has started gaining traction in other cloud businesses and enterprises as it runs on multiple vendors, and ASICs. This basically has the greatest potential to takeover the network operating systems. Think about it as an Android of the network operating systems (NOS).

Nokia is said to be making “significant development investments in the data center networking space”, and so far, develop a chassis-based SONiC implementation built on the requirements of high capacity data centers.

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